LIVES OF THE ENGINEERS.*
Is the two volumes of Mr. Smiles's new work now before us, we see a kind of rudimentary contribution to Mr. Carlyle's desiderated epic of " Tools and the Man " Here at least is a very delightful account of some of the great captains of industry, of some of the knights that professed and practised the chivalry of work. In some respects these men seem comparable to the old classical heroes that have be- come a fable and a name. They remind us of the reality that lies under the legends of Prometheus, Daedalus, Hercules, and Theseus. Thus it has been well said of Mr. Rennie that he was the greatest "slayer of dragons" that ever lived; this title, Mr. Smiles assures us, being given in the Fens to those whose achievements in drainage have purified the pestiferous swamps that bred the poisonous serpents called Sickness and Disease. A mythical halo even tends to glorify the memory of one who, if not formally of the order of the Engineers, yet seized a golden occasion to become temporarily and accidentally a member of it. When Sir Francis Drake, the wealthy adventurer of the Spanish Main, conducted a flow of water to the ill-supplied town of Plymouth, within ten miles of which he was born, from one * Lives of Me Engineers, with an Account of their Principal Works; comprising also a H'"fory of Inkuul Communication in Britain. By Samuel Smiles. With portraita and nameromr Illustrations. Vols. I. and IL John Murray. of the numerous springs on Dartmoor, a tradition arose that he did not cut the "Leet" by the power of money and engineering skill, but by the power of magic. " It is said of him that calling for his horse, he mounted it, and rode about Dartmoor until he came to a spring sufficiently copious for his design, on which, pronouncing some magical words, lie wheeled round, and start' se off at a gallop, the stream formed its own channel, and followed his horse's heels into the town." In general, however, Mr. Smiles's heroes all stand too near to the spectator to benefit by the enchantment which legend confers. We see them surrounded by hard facts, not by brilliant fancies. There is a daily beauty in their lives, it is true, but it is the beauty of conscientious toil, of honest valiant labour, of childlike simplicity and indomitable perseverance. The characteristic trait of these great men was the wholesomeness of their genius. Their free- dom from poetic sensibilities and extravagances, their self-control, temperance, and veracity, are very admirable. They were misled by no will-o'-the-wisp transeendentalisms, nor mocked by that "un- reached Paradise" which is the despair of poets, social philosophers, and men with a passion for reforming everybody but themselves. They sought the work they could do best : they found it, and did it. They had a life to live and they lived it, without asking questions that did not concern them. They trod contentedly the path of duty, pleased but not anxious, seemingly, to find it also the way of glory.
Following the counsel of the late Mr. Robert Stephenson, the author of these two valuable volumes has essayed to trace the his- tory of English engineering from the beginning. He thus gives us an outline, under one of its phases, of the advance of English civiliza- tion. The chapters on the early works of embankment and draining are full of interesting and striking information. We have, many of us, some knowledge of the ways in which Dutchmen literally made their country ; bat we question if we have ever realized before the extent to which our own country has been similarly manufactured for us, or the large districts iu it to which Butler's witty description of Holland was once equally applicable :
"A land that rides at anchor and is moor'd, In which they do not live but go abroad."
Among these districts we may instance Romney Marsh, a region fourteen miles long and eight broad, whose reclamation is supposed to be due to the Frisians. Mr. Smiles tells us how to this day it is held from the sea by a continuous wall or bank ; how the waves have been shut out and firm land produced; how by depositions of shingle along the coast once important seaports have been left i
stranded far inland, and how "sheep now graze where formerly the galleys of the Romans rode." Again, it may not be generally known. that the Thames is an artificial river almost from Richmond to the sea. It was once a broad estuary, attaining in some parts a breadth of several miles. Before human industry imprisoned it in its pre, sent channel, "the higher tides covered Plutostead and Erith Marshes on the South, and Plaistow, East Ham, and Barking Levels on the north." They also washed over the ground now occupied by Southwark and Lambeth. The embankment of the Thames is at- tributed, though on no historical evidence, to the Romans. So late as the reign of James I., the well-known district of Se dgemoor, "13,000 acres of land, now covered with orchards and corn-fields, were reclaimed by drainage and embankment." Or take the great level of the Fens, a tract of about 2000 square miles of land, which not many centuries ago was entirely abandoned to the waters, being "an inland sea in winter and a noxious swamp in summer." Along the shores of the Wash, " the rich fringe of deposited silt," now known as Marshland and South Holland, were reclaimed by the Romans. Another Roman work, the Carr Dyke, highly eulogized by Rennie, extended from the river Nene below Peterborough to the city of Lincoln, and perhaps further—a distance of at least forty miles—and by intercepting all the high land and flowing waters prevented than from flooding the lower grounds. Among the reelaimers of the Fens in the middle ages were St. Guthlac and other religious recluses. Churchman and baron were alike interested in rescuing them from the waters. The first great work of drainage, however, was that carried out in part of the north level by John Morton, Bishop of Ely, in the reign of Henry VII. The object of his forty-foot canal was to carry off the overflowings of the Nene, and to make navigation practicable be- tween Peterborough and the sea beyond Wisheach. the dissolution. of the monasteries, under Henry VUI., checked the drainage of the Fens, and in -Elisabeth's time 5000 acres of land were drowned near Boston. In 1607, a succession of floods burst in the embankments along the eastern coasts of England, sweeping away farms and villages, destroying life, and doing immense injury. James I., on this occa- sion, showed some sparkle of real kingliness when he declared that if no one else would undertake the drainage of these countries (307,242 acres) " he himself would become their undertaker." At that period England was very weak in- engineering ability, and the king was forced to call in the skilled drainers of Holland. Out of this necessity arose the employment of Cornelius Vermuyden, a Dutch engineer of good birth and education. Supported by James I., befriended by Charles, at whose hands he received knighthood, re- tiring for a time before the individual energy of Cromwell, who, chiefly on political .grounds, opposed the scheme of reclamation. Vermuyden would give himself no rest till he had organized some efficient measure for the drainage of the great level, a district almost as large as the whole of the Dutch United Provinces. To carry on this work he sold every acre of the land which had been allotted him, and which he had previously reclaimed. Indifferent to the deadly struggle which divided the nation into two hostile camps, "Ver. muyden's sole concern was how to raise the funds wherewith to
pay his peaceful army of Dutch labourers." His partial success, the recovery of 40,000 acres of drowned land in the north and middle level, the resistance and persecution of the jealous John Bull of the Fens, represented in a popular ballad, as praying " good old Captain Flood" to lead them out to battle, and Vermuyden's final retirement " as a poor broken-down old man," are points well brought in in Mr. Smiles's animated narrative.
Among the pioneers of English engineering we find included Captain Perry, who repaired the breach in the Thames embankment at Dagenham, and who was employed by the Czar Peter in the con- struction of the royal dockyard at Veromze, on the Don, and other works ; William Edwards, the Welsh bridge-builder ; Andrew Meikle, the inventor of the thrashing-machine; and blind John Metcalf, the Yorkshire road-maker, whose history, verging on the marvellous, forms aperfect romance. The art of road-making, so successfully practised by this strangely gifted man, was first brought into England by the Romans, those way wardens of the world. For centuries after our classical conquerors had left this country, the Roman roads, characterized by their directness to the comparative neglect of level, continued to be the main highways of internal com- munication. Our Stretford and Stratford, our Ardwick-le-Street and Chester-le-Street, serve to indicate the path of these ancient lines of road. We cannot now pause over the curious matter contained in Mr. Smiles's sketch of early modes of conveyance, when it took six oxen to draw an old lady to church in her own coach, or when " the Fly," starting from London, slept at Exeter the fifth night from town, and reaching Axminster next morning, breakfasted, and shaved, having a woman for its barber. Leaving the glimpses thus opened np, in a not very remote past, into the manners and customs of our forefathers, so far as they were influenced by the state of the roads, we pass to the more special subject of Mr. Smiles's interesting volumes, the Lives of the Engineers.
The first English engineer, according to Mr. Robert Stejillenson's authoritative decision, was Sir Hugh Myddelton, a cadet of an ancient family in North Wales. In accordance with a prevailing custom among country gentlemen of moderate income in the sixteenth century, Hugh was entered an apprentice of the Guild of the Gold- smiths Company. Prospering as goldsmith, he increased his pro- sperity by his successful enterprise as merchant adventurer of Eng- land. In 1603 we find him representing his native town, Denbigh, in the first Parliament of James I., and about the same time supply. ing jewels for Queen Anne. It was perhaps this connexion with the Court that facilitated his access to the king when he required the royal assistance to bring the New River works to completion. The northern part of London was at this time ill supplied with water. A proposal made by Captain Colthurst to bring a running stream from Hertford and Middlesex was negatived by the Common Council in 1608. The citizens continued to drink impure water, and "fever and plague from time to time decimated the population." It was then that Myddelton stepped forth and declared that if no one else would undertake the work, he would. His intelligence, perseverance, and dauntless courage triumphed over all obstacles. Fuller compares the brave Welshman to one of David's worthies, greatly to the ad- vantage of the Briton, " who, to quench the thirst of thousands in the populous city of London, fetched water, on his own cost, more than twenty-four miles, encountering all the way an army of opposi- tions, grappling with hills, struggaling with rocks, fighting with forests, till, in defiance of difficulties, he had brought his project to perfection." Myddelton was not always equally fortunate. His at- tempt to reclaim Brading Haven, in the Isle of Wight, proved a failure. Not so his mining enterprise in Wales, which turned out eminently successful. Unlike his Dutch predecessor, Sir Hugh Myddelton (James had made him a baronet), died (1631) a rich, honoured, and prosperous man. Descending to a later period, we come to a still more remarkable industrial hero, James Brindley, the first English canal engineer, born 1716, in a remote hamlet in the High Peak of Derby, three miles to the north-east of Buxton. The story of his life is derived almost entirely from original sources—from family papers in the possession of Robert Williamson, Esq., from documents communi- cated by Lord Ellesmere, and the valuable MS. collection of Joseph Meyer, Esq: We may add here that Mr. Smiles has enjoyed similar advantages in compiling his narrative of the Life of Rennie as well as that of Telford. All these biographies, including that of Smeaton, seem to us ably drawn up. To say which is the best done would be to us no easy task, but perhaps the Life of Brindley is that which has most interested us.
Brindley's mechanical bias early displayed itself. He used, when a boy, to visit a neighbouring grist-mill, examine water-wheels, cog- wheels, drum-wheels, carry away the details of the machinery, and, with the aid of a bit of wood and a knife, reproduce the arrangements he bad observed. Till the age of seventeen he turned his hand to anything that came up. He then offered himself as an apprentice to Abraham Bennett, a wheelwright. In two years' time, though he had in his master's opinion learned next to nothing, he had, in reality, acquired much valuable practical information. The "bungling apprentice" and "blundering blockhead" had a head that thought, as well as a pair of hands that worked indifferently and worse. By dint of thinking, a knowledge of millwork at last placed Brindley above all his fellow-craftsmen, above his master himself.' Bennett had undertaken to construct the machinery of a new paper-mill to be erected on the river Dane. The machinery, when made, wouldn't fit, " and, what with drink and what with perplexity, Bennett soon got completely bewildered." One day Brindley was missing. Having now attained his majority, his master thought he had left his service never to return :
" Sunday came and passed—still no word of young Brindley; he must have run away ! On Monday morning Bennett went to the paper-mill with his fruitless work ; and lo ! the first person he saw was Brindley, with his coat off, working away with greater energy than ever. His disppear- ance was soon explained. He had been to Smedley mill to inspect the ma- chinery there with his own eyes, and clear np his master's difficulty. He had walked the twenty-five miles thither on the Saturday night, and on the following morning he had waited on Mr. Appleton, the proprietor of the mill, and requested permission to inspect the machinery. With an unusual degree of liberality Mr. Appleton gave the required consent, and Brindley spent the whole of that Sunday in the most minute inspection of the entire arrangements of the mill. He could not make notes, but he stored up the particulars carefully in his head, and believing that he had now thoroughly mastered the difficulty, he set out upon his return journey, and walked the twenty-five miles back to Macclesfield again."
Brindley was not mistaken. He had mastered the difficulty. What was more, he had saved the old man, to whose business he ere long succeeded. We cannot follow him in the successive phases of his professional or domestic life. From erecting flint mills, clearing coal mines of water, trying his hand at the improvement of engines, he passed into the employment of the Duke of Bridgewater, in some important respects a true Duke, or leader of men. Mr. Smiles's pic- ture of Manchester as it was more than a century ago, his account of the relations between the Duke and Brindley, the derision with which Brindley's "Castle in the Air" (Barton Aqueduct) was greeted before it passed into a fact, the opening of the canal between Worsley and Manchester, its extension to Runcorn, the construction of a succession of canals, are all noticeable passages in this double biographical narrative, a memoir of the Duke being interwoven with that of Brindley. There are some few facts in Brindley's career that are too characteristic to be omitted here. The highest wage he re- ceived while in the employment of the Duke was 3s. 6d. a day. On one occasion his daily expenses for " ating and drinking" amounted to only 6d. He studied in all ways, says Mr. Smiles to economize the Duke's resources, that every shilling might be spent on the prose- cution of the works. Brindley's spelling, as we have seen in one instance, was peculiar. This man, who could think and invent, had little book-learning. There is something half-humorous, half-pathetic, in the entries which he makes in his Diary. Thus we find him making an " ochilor survey from Saldnoor [Sale Moor] to Stockport," or res.istering the "crorrnation of George and Sharlot," or recording., " ad a grate Division of 127 fort Duke, 98 hrs, for IS Duk 29 Me Jorete." This " blundering blockhead," who could scarcely read or write, was, however, a man who removed difficulties " with a facility which appears so much like inspiration that you would think Minerva was at his fingers' ends.'.' The public-house on the Moss, now a small whitewashed cottage, where the Duke, Brindley, and Gilbert used to discuss their canal projects, " smoking their pipes, with a pitcher of ale before them, melancholy and silent,' is perhaps more memorable than the famous " Tabagie" of the Prussian despot in Carlyle.
We can do no more on the present occasion than refer to the life of John Smeaton, the engineer of the Eddystone lighthouse, that of Rennie, for whom was reserved the work that Vermuyden so nobly commenced, and that of Telford, who threw suspension-bridges over the Menai and the Conway. The local sketches and the personal anecdotes with which Mr. Smiles has diversified his narrative are appropriate and entertaining. Our author has no vivid colouring, but he tells his tale in a plain honest style. He selects his facts judiciously ; he never proses; and he succeeds in conveying to the mind, without any rhetorical art, a clear impression of the men whose lives he narrates, and whose characters he delineates. His book, thus far, is full of interest and instruction. There is not one of his heroes who was not admirable for more than one high intellectual and moral quality. The portraits and illustrations with which it is accompanied enhance the value of a work whose great merits seem likely to secure it a corresponding popularity.
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